Reforming Institutionalised Citizen Deliberation: An Update on the Permanent Citizens’ Dialogue in Eastbelgium

Reforming Institutionalised Citizen Deliberation: An Update on the Permanent Citizens’ Dialogue in Eastbelgium

Niessen, C. & Reuchamps, M., (2026) “Reforming Institutionalised Citizen Deliberation: An Update on the Permanent Citizens’ Dialogue in Eastbelgium”, Journal of Deliberative Democracy 1(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.2051

Abstract

Parliaments around the world start associating deliberative citizen participation with their decision-making and, to render the association more system(at)ic, some even go so far as to institutionalise processes of citizen deliberation. With the installation of the Permanent Citizens’ Dialogue in Eastbelgium in 2019, the Parliament of the German-speaking Community in Belgium was one of the first to take this step. Five years later, it was also one of the first to reform an institutionalised model of citizen deliberation. In this article, we revisit this reform, analyse its motivations and discuss its implications for the institutionalisation of citizen deliberation.

Keywords : deliberative democracy, citizen deliberation, institutionalisation, institutional reform, Belgium, Ostbelgien